CLASS UNITY | TRANSCRIPT
Vijay Prashad on Imperialism and the Contemporary Left
Class Unity recently spoke with Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad about his book Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations and the politics of U.S. imperialism. Their discussion moves from coups, sanctions, the dollar system, arms manufacturers, and digital monopolies to BRICS, socialist strategy, and the contemporary left. Prashad also reflects on political education, cadre building, Marxist traditions, and the institutional memory lost to anti-communist repression. The full Class Unity episode is available online, and Prashad’s current research can be found through the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. You can find Washington Bullets through Monthly Review Press.
Class Unity: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Class Unity events production. Today we’re going to be talking to Vijay Prashad. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of 40 books, including Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, The Darker Nations and The Withdrawal with Noam Chomsky. He is the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. Today we’re going to be discussing Prashad’s most recent book, Washington Bullets, which includes ample research about how the U.S. has interfered in other countries’ political and economic affairs on behalf of American and transnational corporations’ interests, specifically through the CIA. First, we will hear a short presentation from Prashad on his book and U.S. imperialism more generally, and then we’ll open up for questions from the broader group. Okay.
Vijay Prashad: Okay, so nice to be here. This book, Washington Bullets, is a very quick, short, I hope adrenaline-filled journey through the nasty history of U.S. imperialism. I actually wrote this book in a few weeks after the coup d’etat against Evo Morales in 2019. Mr. Morales was sitting in his office, a general of the Bolivian Armed Forces walked in, told him, you’ve got to leave, otherwise you’ll die. And Evo Morales left his office, went into hiding, eventually went to Mexico, then Argentina. When he was in Argentina, I was in touch with him and I said, I’m really angry about this. And, you know, I basically spent a few weeks fuming and walking around, taping myself, talking about things that I had read over the years. I transcribed a lot of it, and a lot of it is direct transcription from my fuming. For instance, the opening section about what is the cost of a bullet. You know, it’s not just the cost of a hotel room, the cost of this cost of that. It’s in fact, you know, a destructive history left behind in the country and so on. And when the book was done, I sent Evo the Spanish version. He wrote a great introduction for it and the book came out. And it’s actually a conjunctural account because it’s based on decades of basically reporting on the crimes of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence more broadly around the world, including through interviews with ex-CIA people, most importantly, Charles Cogan, who was bureau chief in Paris, ran the entire Central Asian operation in the late 1970s and 1980s that included Iran during the Revolution, Afghanistan, and so on.
Vijay Prashad: And they told me some hair-raising stories. The heart of the book is a section called a manual for regime change, where I basically take the CIA texts themselves, principally the after-action report on the coup in Guatemala, and I reconstruct a nine-point manual of how to overthrow a government based on their own material. This is not me extrapolating anything. This is right there in their material. And the reason I did that is I wanted to show the ubiquity of U.S. interference and coups, a lot of people after Evo Morales was overthrown said that well, it wasn’t a coup. He had been there too long and so on. And I always felt strange reading The New York Times, for instance, a piece of garbage when it comes to reporting the rest of the world. Forget the United States. I wouldn’t want to judge it. But when it comes to the rest of the world, The New York Times is a piece of garbage. They would allow people to write things like Evo Morales should go for the sake of democracy. And I’m thinking you’re not Bolivian. Like, how can you speak for the Bolivian people? You’re not Bolivian. Like you’re talking in the words of democracy, like in the name of democracy, I, an American, think that Evo Morales should leave.
Vijay Prashad: Who the hell are you to be giving orders to? Well, of course, you are the imperial center of the world. And that’s exactly how you think. I mean, Thomas Friedman has made it an entire career of lecturing people about democracy, like, man, your own democracy is useless. You know, you don’t have a democracy. You have some sort of strange oligarchic system with an anachronistic electoral college and you’re then telling other people how they should run their political system. For God’s sake. I mean, you know, Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court decided the election, not even the population. And so the book was written to inform people about the fabric of how U.S. imperialism operates. It’s interesting, you know, I know in the last 10-odd years, people have been going around saying, well, there’s not one imperialism. There are multiple imperialisms. And I always think, really, we did some calculations. Seventy-five percent of world military spending is spent by the United States, its NATO allies and its NATO partners. Seventy-five percent. The Chinese spend under 10 percent of world military spending, just under 10 percent. The Russians, four percent of world military spending. You add the Russians and Chinese up, it’s 14 percent. That’s 14 percent. And they are not even in a military alliance, they have a strategic alliance, whereas NATO is a real military alliance, a genuine threat to the world.
Vijay Prashad: When Chomsky said the United States government is the largest terrorist force in the world, he was not exaggerating. This was not a joke. Now, obviously, it’s difficult to convince people who believe in liberalism or who believe in, you know, the great glory of the U.S. Constitution. But let’s take the U.S. Constitution for a minute. The U.S. Constitution. If any human being who lives in the United States believes that the values of the United States are the values of the Constitution, you’ve lost your mind. The values of a country are not the values of its Constitution, but the values of its budget. And the United States spends more than half its budget on the military. That’s the values of the United States. That’s an imperialist budget. You really need 900 military bases around the world. Do you really have to interfere in every single election in countries that you don’t like? I mean, is it really necessary? What did the United States get out of the war in Afghanistan? At the end, they got the Taliban back. What did the United States get from trying to overthrow the Syrian government? Nothing. The government is still standing. What did the United States get for overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq? And I’m not saying he’s a great guy, but what did the United States get?
Vijay Prashad: It got a strengthened Iran and it got a strengthened Taliban. The Taliban was thrilled that Saddam Hussein was overthrown. You know, I mean, the United States, in fact, gave a gift to Iran between 2001 and 2003. It got rid of its two adversaries, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. I mean, what does U.S. intervention get? It often gets the exact opposite of what the great leaders in Washington say. So this book was effectively written to show people the granular details of how these things happen, including the fact that it is partly about the kind of, let’s say, the propaganda of the U.S. media. Two years ago, The New York Times ran an article in which it accused me personally and the institute I run of being in the pocket of the Chinese government, which is a curious business because the reporter who sent me the questions, long questionnaire, he didn’t ask me a question. He asked me to deny things like, do you deny that you receive money from the Chinese government? Do you deny that you have worked for this? I mean, what was that like? It’s like a McCarthyite interrogation. I tore that up and I wrote him an email saying, you know, you should respect the people that you are trying to interview.
Vijay Prashad: Like, give me some respect, man. I mean, I’m in my fifties. I’ve been at this game a long time. You want to know about my institute and its funding, talk to me. But no, they want to basically slander you. That’s the nature of imperialist disinformation. And the cleverest thing they’ve done is to say that everybody who they don’t agree with is a purveyor of disinformation. So, for instance, I’m saying to you now that 75 percent of world military spending is the United States, its NATO partners and the NATO bloc itself, and they will come back and say that’s disinformation. How is that disinformation? It’s your own submission that this is how much you spend on the military. But they will like to shoot the messenger rather than debate the message. That’s part of what we call the hybrid war. Or that’s part of their manual for regime change. It’s to delegitimize critics, call them all kinds of names. And I’m sorry to say a lot of people get scared by this and get silenced by this. You know, you have to have skin made of God knows what rubber or something, or you just are like a crazy person. I’ll end with this, guys. When I was working with Chomsky on the book, The Withdrawal, I asked him one day, you know, Noam, you’re an old man.
Vijay Prashad: All these years you’ve been attacked by the U.S. media, you know, you’ve never been published in many of the periodicals. The New York Times published him once, subsequently on artificial intelligence. Nothing to do with foreign policy. You never get published in the Boston Globe. You’re never on National Public Radio and so on. And I said, how do you tolerate all the attacks against you? And his answer to me was priceless, completely classic Noam Chomsky. His answer was because I’m arrogant. But of course, we can’t be arrogant people. We have to be good-natured, good people. We have to take the brickbats. Why? Because we believe in something. We believe that imperialism is a scourge. It’s destroying the planet. It’s not allowing us to advance the needs of humanity. We can’t allow imperialism to dictate the terms of how we want to live on the planet Earth. We have to have comrades to give us bravery to confront some of this stuff. Why am I happy to be with you? Because I feel that we will be comrades together, that we will give each other strength in battling one of the worst forces that has emerged in the world, which is U.S. imperialism. That’s what I wanted to start with, Caroline. And you said then we can just chat.
Class Unity: Yes, thank you so much. I’m going to go ahead and open it up for questions. Give me one second. Again, thank you so much for coming to talk to us, Vijay. So I’m going to turn your question back at you. What is actually accomplished through these pretty embarrassing military failures and adventures of the United States? What do you think is accomplished and why do you think the United States government persists in its mythologizing of its own adventures when nobody seems to believe it anymore?
Vijay Prashad: Okay, so I would say there’s a group of things, you know, not just one thing. One is an old habit that dies hard: white supremacy. It’s an old habit. It dies hard. It’s tough to get rid of it. This belief that there are savages in the world that need to be contained. This kind of language comes up all the time. You know, these people don’t know how to rule themselves. They need to be ruled by us. Or at least they need to be advised by us. So one is that it genuinely makes an appearance like a mole putting its head above ground once in a while. You get a naked statement of white supremacy. That’s one. Secondly, there is an enormous economic advantage in preventing states, particularly in the Global South, from exercising sovereignty over their land and their wealth. So the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the richest places on planet Earth, $2 trillion in known reserves of minerals and metals. Yet half the population lives under the poverty line. If a government in the Democratic Republic of Congo were able to exercise sovereignty over its minerals and metals, insist that it receive more of the revenue rather than the multinational corporations, and use that wealth to build the capacity of the people, industrialize the country and so on.
Vijay Prashad: The profit rate for the multinational corporations would deteriorate. So there is a super profit which is attained by keeping the conditions of life of people in the Global South down, pretending that people say in India don’t need a high quality of life. You know, they’re Indian, man. They believe in the afterlife. Next life, they’ll be born as whatever like a bird. What does it matter? When an Indian has a tragedy, people say, well, you know, they’ll be reborn. But, you know, when one white person is killed, that’s a huge tragedy, a horrible thing. You see this all the time when the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean. Newspapers around the world said eight Germans killed. The fact that there were like 50 people in Thailand in that same town killed was irrelevant. The headline was: eight Germans killed. I mean, what the hell? You know, it’s like the way they report the news from Gaza. Now, you know, six Israelis killed by the Palestinians. But then it’ll be 25 or 100 Palestinians died. They just fucking died. Nobody killed them. You know, they just they decided that I’m going to call a bomb to fall on my house and I’m going to die. Nobody killed them. But it’s six Israelis killed by Palestinians. That dehumanization is part of the suppression of the life rate, the kind of standard of living for people.
Vijay Prashad: There is a material interest in using force to do that. The third is again, a force of habit. You know, a CIA agent told me years ago, if you have a big enough hammer, everything looks like a nail. Every problem you think can be solved by violence. This happens inside the United States as well, right? One person has cut somebody off on the road. Come on, man. This person did a bad thing, drove like that. No, I’m going to take my fucking gun out and shoot you. What is that? You have a big enough hammer. Everything looks like a nail. You know, I mean, this is a really bad cultural habit. The habit of diplomacy, the habit of negotiation, the habit of forgiveness and so on. I mean, when Osama bin Laden died, I went on National Public Radio and I said, you know, this has really bad implications for international relations, because India might just cross the border and kill somebody in Pakistan. It could start a minor war in the region. It’s very bad practice. You know, the United States just crossed the border, killed somebody. Bill O’Reilly went nuts, you know, and he made me the pinhead of the week. And I don’t know if any of you remember Bill O’Reilly or his TV show.
Vijay Prashad: It was horrible. He sent his bulldog, Jesse Watters, who has since replaced O’Reilly on his show to my house. At the time I was living in Massachusetts, Jesse Watters drove overnight from New York to be outside my house in the morning, ambushed me and asked me a question. I said something about there are better ways to get justice than killing somebody. And Bill O’Reilly spent a week ridiculing me, saying that this idiot, you know, he thinks you can forgive people. Yes, I believe that. Maybe not bin Laden, but certainly I would have preferred he was arrested and brought to trial so that he could reveal what was the story behind the story. You know, that would have been super interesting. Why did you have to kill him immediately? The guy was basically on dialysis, for God’s sake. I doubt that you needed to kill him in order to take him into custody, but they didn’t want him to say anything. They killed him anyway. That’s not the point. The point is: if you have a big enough hammer, everything looks like a nail. So that’s the third thing I’d say. But there’s a fourth thing I want to emphasize. There’s a lot of money in war. You know, there are arms dealers making a lot of money. Some of the U.S.’s biggest corporations are nasty, vicious arms dealers.
Vijay Prashad: In the old days, when people actually watched broadcast television, two of the three major networks were owned by weapons manufacturers. You know, I’ve forgotten, CBS was owned by Westinghouse. Westinghouse doesn’t just make refrigerators. It makes bombs. It makes delivery systems and so on. I think one of them, ABC was owned by Disney. Okay, I don’t think they make weapons, different kind of weapon, perhaps, but not weapons. But NBC was owned by General Electric, which doesn’t just make your toasters, makes weapon systems. So two out of the three broadcast channels owned directly by arms companies. The influence they have on U.S. society is unparalleled. No other country has arms manufacturers celebrated the way they are in the U.S. When Zelensky came from Ukraine to the United States, he sat around directly with arms dealers and they had no shame. They took a picture and posted it online. All the CEOs of arms companies meeting the Ukrainian president, because boy, that Ukrainian war, tasty, lots of money made with the death of Ukrainians and Russians. A lot of money made by American arms companies. And you know whose money it is? It’s your money, because your taxes are being given to Ukraine to buy weapons from U.S. companies, which then make mega profits and control the communication systems and make sure that at the football games, everybody is saluting jets as they fly over.
Vijay Prashad: This ‘thank you for your service’ culture of militarism. Those are the four reasons why I think it’s so much easier to go and whack somebody. Chomsky says the United States behaves like The Godfather. Don’t want to negotiate. Just, you know, we’re going to whack him. We’re going to whack him. You know, Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
Class Unity: Okay, next on stack. You talked about like the kind of the way that imperialism kind of worked post World War Two with like ABC, NBC and the weapons manufacturing companies owning media back then. Could you comment just a little bit on like kind of the newer kind of propaganda distributors, like kind of like the social media, you know, so like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook and just kind of how they’re kind of continuing business as usual, even though they like to portray themselves as ‘for the people’ or when they’re really just toadies for the empire.
Vijay Prashad: Well, this is interesting because I mean, if you immediately look at something like Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, you get a good picture of Musk and the power that he has over the world’s information systems. When Evo Morales was overthrown in that coup, there was a dispute. Several of us were in a little Twitter exchange with Elon Musk. I had written an article saying that Elon Musk is big on this coup because he is in touch with Bolsonaro to build a car battery factory in Brazil, and they want access to the lithium from Bolivia. Then Elon Musk just wrote, we can coup anybody we want. That’s the owner of X. Okay, we can coup whoever we want. That’s Elon Musk. But in fact, he’s not the worst. Really, if you want to look at the worst, it’s Google. And again, you don’t need to talk to me about this. Google, by the way, over 80 percent of the world uses Google to go online. And this is actually basically 100 percent because of the 20 percent, you know, in China, they have their own systems. So even in China, people are using Google. But the 20 percent that don’t use Google are mostly the Chinese. Soin the United States, it’s 100 percent people who use Google and Google tools.
Vijay Prashad: It’s not just the Google search engine. It’s also a whole bunch of Google tools that we use that are inside our computers and so on. Well, the previous boss of Google wrote a book where he talked openly about how Google has a very intimate relationship with the National Security Agency. In fact, it’s always puzzling to me how people say, well, China might spy on us. Forget China might spy on us. Google’s former CEO wrote a book saying we give information to the NSA, whatever they want. Edward Snowden proved in the slides that he released that the major tech companies provide your metadata at least, if not more. By the way, it’s not just metadata, it’s at least the metadata, but maybe other things as well. Those who they select, you know, for instance, I’m going to take all of Caroline’s emails and pass them through the shredder to see if there are key words there. And then I’m going to read those emails because it’s not just the metadata. If the metadata suggests that Caroline is in touch with, I don’t know, Ken and Ken is, you know, the cousin of a terrorist. Then I’m just going to go and read all of Caroline’s emails or at least allow the AI to go in and look for, you know, a thousand different words that are going to set us off.
Vijay Prashad: I mean, this is happening already. So we are at a different phase now. If you look at Meta’s products, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, you look at the attack on TikTok. I mean, this suggests anxiety, you know, that famous interview last year, I believe or maybe earlier this year where Mitt Romney was sitting on a stage and Mitt Romney said, I’m just worried that all these protests around Israel are all happening because of Instagram. And we need to try to like, you know, canalize information on Instagram. We need to intervene more. I mean, what does that mean? More Zionist disinformation on Instagram. I need to get more, you know, Instagram feed things that show me how great Israel is, how I can even go and settle in a kibbutz. I mean, for God’s sake, man, they are telling us directly that, you know, they are anxious about any openings in social media as an example. But why do I say Google is worse? Because Google has access to everything you do because of the array of Google tools that we use. Amazon is, in fact, even more intrusive because most of this, including probably this Google call, will be archived in an AWS system. You know, Amazon runs the largest archiving through AWS.
Vijay Prashad: And so their web services are actually more profitable than Amazon delivery by now. So these are ways in which they are in our lives now through algorithms, through canalizing information. You’re a Marxist. Your posts are not going to go very far. Why? Because you posted a picture of Che Guevara. They immediately slow down the traffic to my page. This is extremely easy to do. You don’t need to hire people to go and scour the millions of things. AI can do this in a second. You have AI go out there looking for the word Che Guevara. You know, and if they find Che Guevara on my page, slow that page down. That’s all done automatically. You don’t even need to have, you know, any kind of human interference here. I mean, when posts get tagged on all these networks, right, they’ll say the tagging is all done by AI. When you write a post saying this happened in Venezuela and underneath that they say, well, the truth is this happened. That’s all done by AI. And so there’s a way in which that has already revealed to us how they have canalized our information, that our stuff doesn’t go out as ubiquitously as others, even if you pay for the premium. We know this because we at our institute are doing a study on digital monopolies, and we have a team of really crack software people who are looking at the software behind information transfer these days, just to let you know that most of the world’s undersea cables are owned by private companies, that Elon Musk’s company, for instance, owns more satellites than the Chinese government.
Vijay Prashad: This one company owns more satellites than the Chinese government. So, you know, this is the kind of material we are trying to put together. So when you say, and Jonathan, you’re right to say, well, you know, that’s one thing about ABC, NBC, but we are in a different stage. Lockheed doesn’t have to directly own Twitter to move an agenda. Lockheed doesn’t have to own Google. Google is ‘owned,’ in quotation marks, by the Defense Department because, you know, Eric Schmidt of Google, he willingly and happily collaborated with the Defense Department and the NSA. You’ve got to read Eric Schmidt’s book, if you doubt anything I’m saying, because Schmidt just says it all.
Class Unity: I’m going to insert myself in stack because you’re talking about what I wanted to ask about, which is the election obviously is coming up. The U.S. election more specifically. It’s really interesting to me that like the biggest, like some of the biggest tech billionaires in the world, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel seem to be very interested in a Trump presidency. And I know that for Elon Musk in particular, there’s like the NLRB case and stuff like that. And for the others, it seems like it’s sort of ideological, but I don’t think that’s the full story because it’s interesting to me that Trump is soft on Russia, but he’s tough on China. And I think that might have something to do with some of the kind of tech industry. I wondered if you have like a take on this. Like, what do you see be like the difference between Trump and the Democrats, if any, like, what is it that they are, what is it that they want right now? I mean, it’s I’ve been feeling like a little bit of a liberal lately because I am very worried about like interference and tech interference, not foreign interference in the election and misinformation, that sort of thing. So I don’t know if you have any like insight into that.
Vijay Prashad: Well, firstly, Caroline, you made the great mistake of saying the name Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is a snake. He’s a nasty piece of work. He’s not a good man. I don’t often say that about individuals. You know, most people have a lot that is redeemable and so on. But Peter Thiel is something else. You may not know much about him. He co-founded PayPal, sold it to eBay, made a lot of money. He’s just a really horrible person. His views are appalling. I’ve been in his presence. He’s just not a nice person. Yeah. And so these people are actually ideologically oriented to Trump, not necessarily because of a material interest. They are ideologically oriented to Trump. They very much hate all the things that, you know, what they call the woke agenda. They hate all that stuff. You know, I mean, and I don’t get it. I mean, I know I recognize what you said, Jonathan, about driving a class agenda. I think that’s all good and important. But that doesn’t mean that, you know, one ends up anti-gay, for instance, or anti-trans or, you know, that these things become huge dog whistles, which is classic in American politics. Yeah.
Vijay Prashad: Thiel actually hates all this stuff, you know, and Musk as well. They make nasty jokes about it. We’re talking about people’s dignity. You know, people are struggling to find a way to live in the world. Okay. It’s hard enough being a person who sort of fits into the binary gender system or whatever. It’s hard enough just bloody being an adolescent, you know, in the world. Be compassionate to adolescents. No, these guys bully kids, man. That’s what they are. I mean, they are bullies of kids, you know, and they’re nasty. So they are ideologically committed to Trump. This is not necessarily that there’s a material interest. You know, they are actually Trumpists in that sense. I find it hard to talk about the U.S. election because from my perspective, you know, I live in Latin America. From my perspective, it doesn’t matter who becomes the president. They are going to be imperialist anyway. Their class orientation is completely settled. It’s not up in the air. Democratic Party used to be a coalition of civil rights groups, you know, working class trade unions, whatever used to be a big coalition. But it functioned poorly because it was an unwieldy coalition. But in the 1990s, Clinton, Lieberman, and people like that associated the Democratic Leadership Council created structures that took the decision making away from the coalition.
Vijay Prashad: And they imposed a neoliberal ideology on the Democratic Party. It’s never been able to recover from that. Even though the elements of the coalition remain in place, you know, they continue to go to the convention and whatever. And you continue to have appalling people put forward as candidates. I mean, Kamala Harris is an appalling candidate. You know, she may have more personality than Biden. But my God, if that’s your standard to have more personality than a man who’s struggling with his old age, that’s shameful. I mean, for a political party. So I have a hard time talking about this because I do recognize that there are, you know, within the United States, some distinctions that are important. I mean, you know, again, whatever one says, women’s right to choose is important. But the thing is the Democrats never really protect women’s rights to choose. That’s the other thing is that they keep using these things. Today, we released a newsletter where I basically make the argument about the intimacy between liberalism and the far right, the intimacy. And I’m calling it a far right of a special kind because I don’t think actually Trump is a fascist. I think Trump is a jerk. He’s the far right of a special kind.
Vijay Prashad: But the gap between liberalism and that far right of a special kind is remarkably narrow, remarkably narrow. They try to emphasize the difference, you know, saying, oh, you know, Trump says I’m more of a nationalist. I mean, you know, Biden is deporting so many people like how is Biden not a right-wing nationalist? I mean, how is he not that? Okay, they may have different styles. Democratic Party might be slightly less harsh. Man, Biden, if you go back and watch tape of Biden attacking Anita Hill during the Anita Hill hearings, you’ll get a sense of the great difference between the liberals and the far right of a special kind. There’s an intimacy there. They both believe in neoliberal policies and so on. In that sense, again, I don’t want to make some blanket statement. But honest to God, I would vote for somebody, a third party, to build structures for the left to emerge in 20, 30 years. But this everybody rally behind the Democrats in the last minute, I think, prevents building the structures for a genuine emergence of another party. You know, it’s not just about who’s going to win this election. If, let’s say, the whole left voted behind one platform and built one structure, you know, whatever you call it, green, red, brown, doesn’t matter to me, a structure, you know, that then can confront the bourgeois parties at a later point.
Vijay Prashad: Not now, not crazy. You know, Claudia De la Cruz is not going to win now. Cornel West is certainly not going to win now. Jill Stein is not going to win now. But the structures need to be built for a future electoral challenge. That would build the grassroots strength of people on the ground. So every time we talk about election, we’re always stuck in the same place. Who’s the lesser evil? I hate that stuff. I don’t even agree that there’s a lesser evil. I say, what’s the 20-year plan for the U.S. left? What’s the 25-year plan? Then now they come back, liberals will say, but the planet might be dead by then. Well, for God’s sake. I mean, you know, guys, have at it. Either you work to actually save the planet or let us build a 30-year plan.
Class Unity: I agree with you. Ben, next on stack. Hi. Yes, thank you, Vijay, for talking with us and answering questions. On the topic of kind of new media and new technologies of imperialism, I thought it was really interesting in your book, how you explain this shift from coups through tanks and military officers and supporting dictators to coups through banks and sanctions and NGOs and lawfare, what you might generally call like soft power. Can you explain a bit more about why and how this shift occurred? What was going on in U.S. imperialism? What was going on in the resistance to U.S. imperialism? And does that change what the left should do in response?
Vijay Prashad: Well, this is a really good question. And Ben, thanks for noticing that in the book, because that’s important, that shift in tenor and tone. Obviously, these things are happening simultaneously, In 1970, on September 4, when Salvador Allende wins the election. The United States was already using economic power. In fact, that’s when Nixon says to Kissinger, let’s make the economy scream. So it’s not exactly that this is a new thing. It’s there, but it gets emphasized more after the 1990s. So one of the important things is the collapse of the USSR means the collapse of an alternative structure for trade, development, and so on. The USSR used to trade with a lot of countries like Cuba, for instance, where they just bartered goods and services. They didn’t have to go through the U.S. dollar. After the collapse of the USSR, in the period of globalization, what was most globalized was the dollar and the dollar systems of reconciling trade, moving money, for instance, through the SWIFT system of wire transfers, the only game in town. You send money to somebody else, you know, like a bank transfer that’s within a bank. That’s different. But if I send money from Chile to India, it has to go through a European system which uses the dollar to index the transaction.
Vijay Prashad: If I go to borrow money from the international credit markets, I’m most likely going to borrow dollars because you got to have dollars to buy oil. About 50 percent of the oil market was denominated in dollars. Also, they used baskets of other currencies. But if you want to buy anything, you know, raw materials, most medicines, you most likely would need dollars and then you’d have to borrow dollars and so on. So in the era of globalization, in the 1990s, the dollar really became the most important currency and it’s not just the dollar as a currency. It’s also the dollar banking system that became important. So you reconcile your trades through dollar banking systems. So if I’m in the U.S. Treasury Department and I’m now angry with Venezuela, I will say we’re going to put OFAC sanctions on you. OFAC is the Office of Foreign Assets Control, where if you put an OFAC sanction against a country, then that country cannot use a U.S. bank. Now, the problem is that let’s say Venezuela has money sitting in the Bank of London. It has actual gold. This is a real story. Gold sitting in the Bank of London. The Bank of London is actually connected to the U.S. banking system because they are constantly trading. The city of London is constantly trading with New York and so on.
Vijay Prashad: So the Bank of London is worried that if they conduct a transaction with Venezuela, then they will come under what are known as secondary sanctions. In other words, under secondary or even tertiary sanctions, you can be sanctioned for dealing with someone who is dealing with a sanctioned party. Sothe government of Venezuela does a business deal with a Greek shipping company to carry oil out of Venezuela. The Greek shipping company gets paid through a bank account in London. But because the bank account in London touched the Greek shipping company who is doing a deal with Venezuela, the Bank of London could be sanctioned. Then the entire banking system just says we’re not going to deal with you. It’s just too hot. We don’t want the wrath of the U.S. Treasury Department on us. Soyour credit dries up or also your ability to pay people dries up. Then you have to resort to paying them in gold or you might experiment with Bitcoin, which really didn’t work for any of these sanctioned countries. It’s gotten so bad, Ben, that the Washington Post wrote an expose saying that the world is being sanctioned and it’s not a good thing. It’s gotten so bad that because of the sanctions, many countries, Russia in the lead decided, Okay, fine, we’re not going to deal with the U.S. dollar system.
Vijay Prashad: We’re going to just trade in yuan and we’re going to do different things. We’re going to de-dollarize as much as possible. It’s very difficult to do it as much as possible. Marco Rubio goes on television in the United States and says this de-dollarization is terrible. Why Marco? Why do you think it’s terrible? You don’t even understand mathematics. But yet you think it’s terrible. Why Marco? Marco Rubio says that de-dollarization is terrible because, if countries de-dollarize, the United States cannot control them.
Class Unity: No, go ahead. Hi, Vijay. It’s really great to hear you; I’ve been a huge fan forever. The book was great, although I think there was one small missing portion, which was OPEC, which I assume was not a deliberate omission. I think your target audience wasn’t specifically Marxist, and the book wasn’t intended as a full economic analysis. But I’m really fascinated about OPEC, because it came about, you know, just for the people that probably didn’t hear about this. I think it’s called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and it was established in the 1960s. And the fate of the countries that founded it is interesting, because Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. And they each had a different fate, just because they decided to undermine the Seven Sisters of big corporate oil companies. And then eventually, like, Iraq had the 1963 coup, which was basically anti-communist; Saddam Hussein later came to power. I mean, you know the rest. I wanted to see how you would tie in the economic dimension. I think you did a little bit in the book.
Class Unity: But I don’t think you had enough time to go into the details. And the other thing I really was interested to know your opinion about was that Jason Hickel wrote an article which was very fascinating to me. And it examined the unequal exchange of labor between the Global South and the Global North. And it talked about how the workers from the Global South contribute 90% of the labor that powers the world economy and 91% for international trade. I mean, those are staggering statistics. It also argued that most of the Global South labor, especially India, is highly skilled at this point. So we are in a phase of capitalism in which even the highest-skilled labor—and it probably was always highly skilled—is contributing to the Global North or imperialist economy. I wanted to see how you tie these points to our discussion of imperialism and how that plays a crucial part more than just the military and everything else that, you know, they use as a tool.
Vijay Prashad: Yeah, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, what I had mentioned earlier about wage suppression. Wage suppression in much of the Global South, when countries or when movements assert themselves and say, you know, we want a higher revenue or royalty for our exports. We want to be able to pay our workers more, Jamaica saying we want to pay our nurses more so the nurses don’t go and work in New York City and in London and so on. That’s when they get whacked. They either get hit with a bad IMF report that says, why are you subsidizing your health care sector or they face a military embargo or something or sanctions and so on. At the bottom is the necessity of wage suppression. You know, Marx talks about this in the Grundrisse and in Theories of Surplus Value. In Capital itself, Marx points to two strategies for extracting surplus value. One is by absolute surplus value and the example there is the working day. And then the second is relative surplus value. The example is mechanization. But in Theories of Surplus Value and in the Grundrisse, Marx talks about a third strategy for extracting surplus value. And it’s interesting, there’s a footnote in Capital where Marx says that, you know, in the barges of England, you also see this third strategy.
Vijay Prashad: He doesn’t call it a third strategy. I’m calling it a third strategy. In the barges of England, you see a third strategy. The barges of England, he says, are not pulled by horses, but are pulled by women. And the reason they are pulled by women is if one woman dies, you can replace her with another. But if a horse dies, you have to buy another horse. So the woman’s labor, her death is inconsequential to you because you’ll always find another woman to come and pull the barge. But if a horse dies, you have to buy another one. So it’s a capital expense. So in other words, this third strategy is wage suppression, is taking advantage of the hierarchies in the world. You can say then that Indians who are highly skilled tech people can be paid one-fifth, one-tenth, or one-thirtieth of somebody in the United States with as much skill, if not more skill, in fact, biotech engineers in Bangalore getting paid one-hundredth of what a biotech engineer in Switzerland gets paid. So you can outsource a lot of sections of your work to these people and their wages are suppressed. It’s not about the basket of goods. The standard of living of a tech worker in India is much lower than the standard of living of a tech worker in Silicon Valley.
Vijay Prashad: So the third form of extraction of surplus value is along the North-South axis. And that’s what Hickel points out in a very good article because it’s empirically based and it’s funny because I’ve been reading his work for a long time. And then I was told that there’s an American communist with the same name, turns out they have similar names, but this guy is a serious scholar, not a communist, very, very interesting person. That article supports the point. Now you asked about OPEC as well, right? OPEC is not really the key institution today around which this dispute is taking place on let’s say the North-South axis, although OPEC+ is important. The enlarged BRICS has major OPEC+ members. Iran and Saudi Arabia are members, while Russia is an OPEC+ member. Russia is not an OPEC member, but a major producer of natural gas and oil. So the BRICS+, the expanded BRICS, if BRICS+ includes Venezuela in a future intake, you’ll have a lot of the world’s energy supplies within BRICS+. OPEC itself has lost its political teeth. When it was formed in the 1960s, it was far more political than it has been since then. It has been dulled, but BRICS+ has the capacity of being quite energetic politically to advance the cause of countries that are struggling to develop, build their own sovereignty and so on.
Vijay Prashad: In our work, in our institute, the word sovereignty is super important. The Global South strives for sovereignty, doesn’t want interference, wants to build its own relationships with other countries, doesn’t want to be told who they can talk to and who not. That’s a very key thing. So yeah, it’s not so much OPEC any longer, but where you should look carefully is at developments in the BRICS+ because they now include several of the largest OPEC+ members.
Class Unity: Daniel. Okay. Hi. Thank you so much Vijay. This is very interesting. So a few things, I have a couple of questions. One is, so I want to say, I read your book, Washington Bulletsand really loved it. And one of the reasons why I liked it so much is because, you know, it’s often said that a weak spot in Marxist theory is the theory of the state. And this is like an old topic and people say Marx intended to get around to it. He never got around to it. But there’s that line from The Communist Manifesto where Marx says that the executive of the modern state is just the committee for the managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. And your book gives an excellent, how do I say, execution of that idea. Like it really shows that the state of the leading imperialist power is the asset manager-in-chief. If anyone anywhere on earth does anything to prevent, you know, factor mobility of capital and labor, you know, prevent the assets of other countries from being under the ownership of the North Atlantic asset-owning oligarchy, nothing, nothing can stop them from taking power. You can’t have tariffs, you can’t have protections. And so your book really makes that clear. There’s one, you know, just one thing I want to share.
Class Unity: In 1953, Eisenhower said the quiet part out loud and, you know, he said, ‘A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy is the encouragement of a hospitable climate for corporate investment in foreign nations.’ And that’s really a euphemistic way to put it. But so your book really shows like the ugly truth of that. And one of the things you say on page 53 is the cause of underdevelopment is none other than the subsistence of imperialist domination. So countries aren’t undeveloped because they’re falling behind. They’re de-developed because of this state of affairs. So I was wondering if you could say something about how de-development works, maybe with, you know, relation to the dollar, but you already kind of said that. The second question I want to ask you about is if you could comment on the state of the left, not globally, but the state of the left in, say, the United States or Europe, the Anglosphere, because, you know, it’s a really weird situation that we’re in where a lot of self-designating leftists are basically pro-imperialist. They’re pro-NATO, they’re for the Ukraine war, they’re for more money for infinite wars because they understand progressivism in this sort of neoliberal way of civil liberties. And so we end up with a sort of so-called acceptable left or compatible left, a kind of left which, you know, even the CIA could support.
Class Unity: And, you know, indeed, the CIA is using like woke terminology to market itself. And so why, you know, why do we have such a moralistic and an idealistic instead of a realistic and a materialistic left, do you think?
Vijay Prashad: Well, I mean, thanks. I mean, all of you, thanks a lot for having me and really thanks a lot for being so kind to my book. As I said, I wrote the book out of a bizarre sense of, you know, maybe 50 years ago, I would have been high on amphetamines and absinthe and written the book. You know, I was really angry, which is why I filled the book with poetry, because I said, you know, the book, I don’t want to convey anger because anger is the worst emotion to mobilize people. You know, people have to be mobilized with the commitment of those who have fallen, you know, in the past and so on. There’s got to be a way to talk to people. I’m really, really grateful for all the comments you’ve made about the book. Let’s forget your first question. You’re right. We’ve already kind of walked through some of that. I’m interested in the second one because I think it’s a really challenging issue. I think it’s really much easier for people in the context of the kind of affluent world of the North Atlantic, relatively affluent world. I know huge inequalities and so on, but relatively affluent world. It’s easier to have a critique of capitalism than to have a program for socialism.
Vijay Prashad: Critiques of capitalism abound, you know, they abound in the academy. There are so many people and they have weird critiques of capitalism. You know, some of them are like, you know, they critique the narrative of capitalism. Capitalism isn’t a narrative. It’s a real, horrible economic and political system that oppresses real living workers. But anyway, it’s still easier to have a critique of capitalism. But a strategy for socialism is hard to find. So if you just take many of the most prominent Marxist thinkers in the Atlantic world from David Harvey onward, most of them are—I mean, I don’t agree with everything David says about capital, but that doesn’t matter. He’s a very bright man. He’s written excellently about capital and so on. But David doesn’t enter the terrain of socialist strategy, nor do most academic or serious intellectual Marxists, the Amherst group. None of them really enter into conversations about socialist strategy. You know, many of them, in fact, are Marxist critics of capitalism who promote Keynesian solutions at the end of the day. David Harvey is one of them. I mean, the end of the day, David Harvey is a Keynesian. That’s what he promotes. You know, more, you know, more social spending in the downturn. In other words, the state has to spend in order to protect a society from the deepest trough of a crisis.
Vijay Prashad: Come on. You don’t need Marx for that. That’s Keynes. I mean, that’s everything in Lord Maynard Keynes. I mean, why are you going to Marx? But you have a Marxist critique of the system, but you end up with a Keynesian social democratic solution. It’s not the fault of anybody. It’s there in the highest levels of academic Marxism. I would say the highest levels are paralyzed before the door called socialist strategy. And therefore it falls upon you and people like you, Daniel, to think about, well, how do we construct a narrative of socialist strategy? How do we bring back a conversation, a broad-based conversation, a national conversation around socialist strategy? How do you talk to other political organizations? I mean, I know that a couple of years ago, the PSL released a book called Socialist Reconstruction. Pretty interesting. A long book which had their understanding of the U.S. situation and provided a socialist strategy for what to do. Well, I mean, it would be great to have people critique it, build upon it, argue with it, you know, have a real genuine debate. Part of the problem is, where does one have that debate? You can’t have that debate on Facebook and so on. It’s ephemeral. Where are the journals? You know, the serious Marxist journals that are ecumenical, where everybody can contribute.
Vijay Prashad: You know, you don’t have to be one tendency or the other. Where is the common space for dialogue among socialists? I mean, one of the tragedies of, let’s say, the DSA experiment till now is that nobody in the DSA provided that kind of space. I think Class Unity could provide the kind of space for a debate and discussion on socialist strategy. Imagine if Class Unity started publishing a journal, a serious journal on the question of socialist strategy, open to all tendencies. It’s not sectarian. You’re not driving an agenda. You are saying we want all socialists in the United States to contribute to a discussion of what should our strategy be. And start out with the text and say, attack us, debate this, build on it, let’s grow a socialist strategy. Because I think that’s what’s missing. Academic Marxism in the Anglosphere has failed to provide the next step. In other words, they’ve done Marx, they didn’t do Lenin. You know, they in fact jump over Lenin. Most of them go to Gramsci and others. Gramsci is a kind of critique of the Bolshevik project in a strange and interesting way. But they jump over Lenin. Jumping over Lenin, in a sense, leaves you with no way of discussing socialist strategy, because Lenin was the leading thinker about how to build a political party, how to build cadre, how to build a strategy, what tactics are a class tactic and an opportunist tactic.
Vijay Prashad: I mean, this is what Lenin spent his life doing. So you leap over Lenin when you go from Marx to Lukacs or Marx to the Frankfurt School or whatever it is. You miss the crucial question of socialist strategy. Why? Because European Marxism or Western Marxism after Lenin is, as Perry Anderson calls it, a philosophy of defeat. How did we lose? That’s Gramsci’s project. He’s sitting in jail, for God’s sake. How did the working class go to the fascists? How did we lose? Lenin’s project is how do we win? So you’ve got to, in that sense, return to Lenin. But for that, practically, you need a journal that all tendencies and people would respect because it’s non-sectarian. You need a journal. There was one that was coming out called Peace, Land, and Bread. But, you know, it was expensive. It was a printed journal and so on. I mean, I’m not saying do it online. When the International Socialist Organization failed, some of its most sectarian members started a journal, which I think was called Catalyst or something online journal. But that’s not the journal because they were secretly trying to push an agenda. That is not the way. You need an open place for people to debate and dispute ideas. That’s what the left needs.
Vijay Prashad: It needs oxygen. It doesn’t need sectarianism. It needs people to listen to other opinions, build a united front, learn to work together and so on. Maybe that could be a great historical task for Class Unity: why don’t we build the space within DSA initially, but then for the broader U.S. left, a space to have a debate. Jacobin doesn’t do it because it’s instinctively social democratic and is unwilling to be a space to discuss socialist strategy. What they discuss is social democratic policies. Bhaskar Sunkara’s interest is how to develop good social democratic policies that could be enacted today. That’s a kind of Bernieite politics. But you need to go beyond that. How does the working class in the United States take power? Is that even conceivable as an idea? You know, is that just ludicrous? That’s a great discussion, you know, but you’ve got to have a place to have it. And that, I think, in my opinion, that’s lacking. A kind of theoretical journal about strategy. Going back, in other words, to Iskra, not just to old Marx and then to the doddery Frankfurt School that lost interest in changing the world only in interpreting it.
Class Unity: Thanks. Thank you. That’s great. Next we have Jonathan and then C. Yeah, bro. Vijay, you’re awesome, bro. This is exactly the kind of stuff that we need to hear, man. Soyou’re talking about like kind of we don’t need angry, you know, kind of negative emotions, right? So it’s just like, how do we kind of proceed and not be so reactionary, but at the same time have, you know, the strategy, like a vision of a future that’s kind of free from imperialism, but where each individual kind of American or whoever can kind of envision themselves within that society and we can kind of build towards it. So I’ve been kind of intrigued by Michael Hudson and kind of his work. He talks a lot about debt forgiveness and reconciliation. It seems like he’s doing great work in China and with BRICS and kind of building an alternative economic system. And then also just like, bro, like, how did you get so awesome? You know, like, how did the young Vijay turn into this guy? You know, because you’re a fucking rock star, bro. So that’s all I got to say, man.
Vijay Prashad: That’s hilarious. Wait a minute, Caroline, would you like to take C and then I can answer both because, you know, Jonathan has sent us in an interesting direction.
Class Unity: Sure. Yeah. Let’s do that. Yeah. Do you see U.S. imperialism ending anytime? Do you think BRICS could be a challenge to it?
Vijay Prashad: Okay. Let’s get to C first. And then, Jonathan, I think I’m going to close out with your question. So I don’t think BRICS is a challenge to U.S. imperialism, honestly. I don’t think it’s capable of challenging. I think it’s providing some balance in the world. The Chinese do not want a war with the United States. They want to build a high-speed rail that goes at 600 kilometers an hour. I saw the prototype, guys. It is incredible. Okay. Right now, the Acela’s top speed for like 10 miles is 150 kilometers an hour. This is only like a 10- or 15-mile stretch somewhere between Rhode Island and Connecticut, where the train can actually get to 150 kilometers. Right now, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail goes at 320 kilometers per hour, almost the whole run. Obviously, it decelerates at stations and accelerates, but it can reach 320 kilometers per hour. If they didn’t stop, it could be 320 kilometers the whole way. It’s an incredible train. I’ve ridden on it many times, and I’d like to also say that they sell on the train, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, which is very weird, because Haagen-Dazs is fake ice cream, as you know. It’s not really from Scandinavia. It was made up by a guy in the United States, and the fact that China sells Haagen-Dazs on all the trains is a very, very weird thing.
Vijay Prashad: They don’t have U.S. phones. They don’t have U.S. Internet. They don’t use U.S. WhatsApp; they use WeChat, Weibo and Alipay, but they eat Haagen-Dazs. It’s very weird. There’s a lot about China that is very peculiar. BRICS is not a challenge. It’s not going to challenge. They don’t want a military confrontation. They don’t even really want an economic confrontation. They want actually more collaboration. That’s their policy. More collaboration, less confrontation. This is a balancing of the world order. No single master, as Putin said at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. That’s basically, I think, where the BRICS are. We should never exaggerate these kinds of things. You’ve got to watch and wait. It was only formed in 2009. As serious Marxists, we don’t cheerlead for things without understanding the process of history that’s going on. We want to know, as Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology, ‘Communism is the actual movement of history,’ they wrote. We are always seeking to build our theory from the facts, not to build our theory from opinions and prejudice. Always build theory from the facts, and the facts show that BRICS is not up to the task of direct confrontation, and in a way, I would say, thank goodness, because the last thing we want is a full-scale war between Russia, China, and the United States.
Vijay Prashad: The world cannot tolerate that. We need people to say no more war. The Chinese brought the Palestinian factions to Beijing. They brought the Saudis and the Iranians together. They’re doing a great job bringing people together, guys. I mean, give them that. You may not like them for whatever reason. I think what China is doing right now is extremely important, and I think Xi Jinping is very interesting as a world leader, very interesting person. Okay, coming to Jonathan. Now, Jonathan, part two of your question cannot be answered, because that would be weird. I don’t know how to answer how I came to be who I am. What I can say is that I was extremely well-trained by political organizations that I highly respect. My political home in India was extremely generous and kind, and the wisdom of a hundred years of communism was with me through them. You know, there’s no substitute for that. Unfortunately, it makes me very sad that in places like the U.S., McCarthyism, the Red Scare, all of that broke the direct connection you had that goes back all the way to Eugene Debs and, before that, the Wobblies and so on. You don’t have a direct connection to those movements, largely because in the 1950s they really took an axe to our tree, right? And so when you guys come up and say, I’m interested in Marxism, so many people in the Bernie movement who said, I’m interested in socialism, left, whatever, where did they go?
Vijay Prashad: They had to go online to watch videos. They had to read books here and there, scattershot, but they weren’t trained in a political organization. And then I just don’t, you know, I feel it’s unfair for me to say anything, you know, because I had the benefit of having older people say to me, no, this is not how you should behave in a protest. This is what you need to do. You need to build a club. This is how you build a club in a working-class neighborhood. People cannot meet in the evening because they don’t have time and energy, you know, where you could hold your club meeting, you could hold your club meeting on the bus when people are going to work. Those are the kinds of practical wisdom that came from a hundred years of tradition. Yeah. I’m a very big believer in left traditions, very big believer. I’m puzzled when people knock the idea of tradition. Everybody has a tradition, and you have to be proud of our tradition. The United States had a very proud tradition of the left. In fact, I remember reading an essay once about how I may get this wrong, guys. But I think in Nebraska or somewhere, one of those states, the farmers’ movement was so strong, they built their own banking system.
Vijay Prashad: And in fact, remnants of that banking system exist even today, the kind of community banking system built by the farmers, you know, for themselves, they were reds, many of them. Yeah. You know, my friend Jeffrey St. Clair from CounterPunch did a book called Red State Rebels, very interesting histories of communists in Oklahoma and elsewhere doing extremely brave things. So what I would say to you is you’ve got to be proud of that tradition. You know, you can be anti-U.S. imperialism without hating on your own country. You’ve got to be proud of its left traditions. People who hate on the Communist Party of the USA, for instance, are hating on themselves because they don’t understand that’s a proud tradition. They fought for civil rights. They built, you know, political leaders, Ben Davis, they built Angela Davis. You know, Angela Davis was a product of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs in Los Angeles. That’s what shaped her. You know, Ruthie Gilmore, now famous academic, was built in the communist movement in New Haven, Connecticut. I mean, that’s the movement, man. It’s your tradition, all of it. You’ve got to absorb it. W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the great American Marxists, should be celebrated in any Marxist organization in the U.S. Sadly, he had to flee the U.S. and die in Ghana, you know, because he was being persecuted by the U.S. government.
Vijay Prashad: They took away his passport, this, that. Paul Robeson, a great, great American communist. You know, these are the people to build the tradition out of, you know, it’s not a matter of saying, ‘I’m a communist who loves America.’ That’s not it. You’ve got to love your tradition. You can’t extend it and say, well, it’s a great country. Every country has good and bad—its contradictions. It’s not a greater country than any other damn country, man. It’s a good country. It has a left history to celebrate and lift up. The Haymarket martyrs, May Day comes from there. All of that, you know, absorb the tradition, guys. You’ve got to build a tradition. You have to start mentoring people, building cadre—the idea of cadre-building. I can come back another day and we can talk, what does cadre building mean? And so on. You know, this is important, building people who are committed to reading, studying, going out there, talking to people generously, working with people where they are to build political organization, you know, build a little campaign. Sometimes it may be a campaign against the water wasted in a golf course, whatever it may be. It may seem small and insignificant, but it gives people confidence to get involved. That’s what communism is: building the confidence of the working class, us as people who are committed to this, spending our time, building the confidence of the working class. The working class then will spontaneously develop its struggles against the oppression and exploitation of capitalism.
Vijay Prashad: And then we learn how to channel that spontaneous eruption into a productive direction. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s really the art in a way of communism and I do feel terrible, you know. I was in Argentina, Jonathan, and there, 30,000 leftists of my generation were killed, many of them thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean by the dictatorship, the junta, 30,000 people of my generation. My generation was wiped out in so many countries. I joined the Communist Party just when the Soviet Union was falling. So you can understand how my generation, we are the missing generation, you know, people in their fifties and sixties are missing, missing in action. So this kind of thing is really important for us to think about.
Class Unity: Just a second. Okay. So our last question is from Ben. The book is about the CIA and something I’ve wondered about, worried about is that the left is sometimes unable to keep up with changes in imperialism. And I thought your Tricontinental Institute study of hyper-imperialism was very interesting because you talked about the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes and the importance of relationships between the imperialist countries and specifically intelligence relationships between them. So my question is, what is important about these relationships between different Western intelligence agencies and how have things changed with the CIA? Is the CIA itself just as important as it once was back in the days of Allende and Pinochet? Is it less important? How have things changed? Where should we look for the kind of tip of the spear of imperialism these days?
Vijay Prashad: So I’m really glad you read that hyper-imperialism study. I highly recommend it to everybody. It took us a lot of effort to build. You know, I’ve always been a believer that I’m not religious with my Marxism, that Marx can be wrong. Lenin’s study of imperialism is not a transhistorical study. It was written to understand why the Great War broke out. You can’t take Lenin’s text from 1916 and say it applies to today. We have to analyze and build a theory from the facts. That’s what Marxists do. We are not religious people. We build theory from the facts. And the facts demonstrate that we are not in a situation of inter-imperialist crisis. There is one imperialist force which is imposing conflict on the world, full stop. That’s what we argue in that text. And because of that, or rather through that, we also analyze the fact that the bourgeoisie in the West has become decadent. It has no ideas to basically sort out the problems in the world. And its decadence is illustrated by how bad its representatives are. I mean, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, you know, Keir Starmer, Biden, Trump, Harris. I mean, like, give me one leader. I mean, I forgot, Justin Trudeau, the boy king. Give me one leader that I can actually respect, you know.
Vijay Prashad: Not one of them. There is nobody that I would like say, oh, I want to read their memoir. You know, maybe I’d read Trump’s memoir. That could be interesting. But nobody else. You know, Trump only because he’s a nutcase and God knows what the hell he’ll say there. But the rest, I mean, boring, milquetoast people, no ideas, decadent. Decadence doesn’t need to come, you know, in togas with orgies and, you know, whatever, Nero. Violent decadence can come in the obliteration of the imagination. That’s what you see in the Western bourgeoisie. The imagination of the bourgeoisie has been obliterated. I mean, the way they are reacting to the mass murder in Gaza is illustrative of this. During this entire war, the U.S. ruling class has sent a billion dollars worth of arms to Israel. Well played, guys. Well played. Of the imported arms that enter Israel, roughly 80 percent come from the United States and almost 20 percent from Germany, with only a tiny share from other countries. Germany and the United States, that’s, you know, Olaf Scholz, the dullest, most mediocre leader in Europe, completely dull man, if you ever listen to a speech. You know, German generally is quite an animated language. This guy can put you to sleep in German.
Vijay Prashad: I mean, it’s extraordinary. He’s dull. Dull as dishwater. And then on the other side, Biden. I mean, Biden, I can’t understand what he’s saying and I feel bad for him. I still can’t understand what he’s saying. So, you know, there’s that. That’s one part of it, this sort of decadence, dangerousness, dullness, you know, all of that. That’s one part of it. We can’t be religious in our theory. But the other part of it is that it is our responsibility again as, you know, intellectuals and so on to maintain vigilance, you know, to watch the forces that are arrayed against us. Our institute is set up basically to try to analyze the world through the facts today. So today, of course, the CIA continues to be a very dangerous force in the world. And you know, a million examples. But equally important to look at is the ensemble of intelligence operations. The NSA is, of course, a digital-era CIA. They do digital espionage. So does the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, a very important institution that emerged after the main period of the CIA, but CIA personnel are the intellectuals of the intelligence branch. They are the ones who set policy; the NSA people are the snoops. The CIA actually continues to analyze what’s going on around the world.
Vijay Prashad: They’re very dangerous for that. They analyze the world in the interests of the U.S. ruling class. And because of the Fourteen Eyes network, they share intelligence widely and their attempt to discredit critics is done through this Fourteen Eyes network. And I mean, I can tell you I know this because, for instance, I lost a bank account in the United States. They said, we don’t want to keep you as a client anymore because this article in The New York Times says that you’re an agent of the Chinese government. So we don’t want to deal with you. I lost that bank account and couldn’t get a bank account in another country, which is part of the Fourteen Eyes network. And then I realized, Okay, that’s interesting. You know, I cannot bank in at least 14, actually maybe 25, countries; I cannot open a bank account there because there appears to be a red flag attached to my name. And I’m not a sanctioned individual, but still some flag must be there because each time I try, they say, no, sorry, we can’t accept you as a client. There are some problems. One banker even told me there are moral questions. I don’t know what moral questions there are. I mean, you know, I haven’t been exposed to any claims by anybody of immorality. So I really don’t know what they are referring to.
Vijay Prashad: But what I want to say is this shows the kind of very interesting networking of information that exists. And so I don’t want to exaggerate this. I always tell people this could be accidental, that people accidentally decide, oh, well, I don’t want to have this guy as my client. It could be accidental. It could be part of some, you know, Excel sheet that exists somewhere that keeps coming up to annoy me. Yeah. Who knows? I don’t want to exaggerate things. I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I do believe that they are actually in a conspiracy. I don’t believe that you need to theorize it as a conspiracy, but they actually have an open conspiracy. It’s called the Fourteen Eyes intelligence network. They actually conspire against people using their channels of sharing intelligence. So I mean, that’s the definition of a conspiracy. So I’m not fantasizing about some conspiracy in the world between aliens and the U.S. government and whatnot. This is actually a conspiracy. And that’s why I wrote that section in the book about how critics are dismissed by saying, well, you’re just a conspiracy theorist. Well, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but you actually have a conspiracy going and you call it the Fourteen Eyes. I’m not making it up. You said so.
Vijay Prashad: So you’re a conspiracy. I mean, you can go back and forth in a kind of playground way. You’re the conspiracy. No, you’re a conspiracy theorist. No, you’re the conspiracy. We can go back and forth. But the fact is that they have used the idea of conspiracy theory to dismiss people joining the dots between things that they have joined the dots on. You understand? It’s not even like I have to analyze it. They gave it to us on a plate. I didn’t name it the Five Eyes network or the Fourteen Eyes network. They named it the Fourteen Eyes network. I just reproduced their name. So they can’t then turn around and say, you’re a conspiracy theorist. There is no Fourteen Eyes network. You just said there was one. That’s the absurdity of things, Caroline. What can I say?
Class Unity: Totally agree. Thank you so much, Vijay. This was really great. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can go to classunity.org. We run study groups that study capitalism. Most recently, we had one on the 2008 financial crisis. Thank you so much.
Vijay Prashad: Okay. Take care of yourselves. Let’s talk again someday.
Class Unity: Absolutely. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye.